


a letter to the boy i love

by mildlyobsessive



Category: Twenty One Pilots
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Gay, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Letters, Love Letters, M/M, Suicidal Thoughts, extremely gay, so fun stuff all in all
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-17
Updated: 2016-02-17
Packaged: 2018-05-14 17:13:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5751490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mildlyobsessive/pseuds/mildlyobsessive
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Josh,</p>
            </blockquote>





	a letter to the boy i love

Josh,

I didn't know exactly how to start this. 'Dear Josh' seemed too mainstream, too ordinary for the boy who is anything but. 'Dearest Josh' is a little better, I guess. Because you really are, Josh. The dearest person, I mean. But then I just sound like an old lady writing a letter in her nursing home to children who don't care anymore, and I don't like that. 

And now it's three in the morning and my eyes are just as weighed down with tiredness as this crumpled paper is with eraser shavings, so I just wrote your name. That's enough, Josh. You're enough.

I'm worrying about this too much, aren't I? I have a habit of doing that. God, I am so off topic. I'm really sorry. It's just that there's so much I need to tell you, and it's so much easier to explain in this stupid letter that I'm going to slide under your door because I'm too nervous to actually give to you than to actually say it. A pen and paper cooperate with me so much more than my tongue does.

Anyway, back on track. 

I know you, and I know what you're thinking. This isn't that kind of note, Josh. I'm not doing anything stupid. And I wish I didn't have to reassure you about that, but I know you worry about me.

No, I'm writing this because you took me to this gorgeous restaurant tonight. Well, I guess it was yesterday, wasn't it? Whatever. We went to this fancy restaurant and I had the most amazing time with you. The lights, shining from behind their prison of pristine stained glass, seemed to reflect off your eyes. Your eye shone like diamonds, Josh. You were worth so much more than any of the expensive jewels the rich women there smothered themselves in.

After dinner, you told me you loved me.

_Love_. Josh, I've never had anyone love me before, at least not in the way that you meant. People have _liked_ me, sure. Liked me in the way that twelve year-olds like each other, with butterflies in their stomach and nervous little giggles. And they may have _thought_ they loved me, once again in that nostalgic, ephemeral fashion. In that gorgeously pathetic practice of thinking that what they have is love because it's all they know, and, to them, that's enough. And I can't deny that there's a certain beauty to that, but it's not enough for me.

But, Josh, I think that you might have jumped from _like_ into _love_ , and I am both unbelievably happy and unbelievably terrified about that.

There are some things I need to tell you. I say _need_ and not _want_ in the same way I differentiate between _like_ and _love_. So many people use them as synonyms but they're not, are they, Josh? Because I might _need_ to tell you these things, but I sure as hell don't _want_ to.

I tell people and then they leave. That's how it goes, how it's always been, ticking along like clockwork. They slip out of my life carefully, with all the careful precision of a thief. They don't want me to notice that they're leaving, because after they know, after I've made myself vulnerable and weak and pitiable, I'm nothing more than a stick of dynamite with a fuse that's just _begging_ to be lit. And so they close the door quietly on their way out, so as not to provoke the time bomb they now know lives inside.

They don't want me after they know, Josh. And I don't always blame them for that.

But, so far, you've been the exception, J, and I'm hoping that trend will carry over. I'll understand if it doesn't, though. But you have a right to know what you're getting yourself into, in the same way you have a right to decide whether you want to board a sinking ship. It would have been nice for the people on the Titantic to get some prior notice, right?

Well, this is your prior notice, courtesy of the iceberg himself.

I'm a weird person, J. I've known that since I was little. I knew I was weird, and my mom knew I was wrong. _Different_ , she would call me, always with that same sad smile on her face.

I was proud of being different, Josh. I prided myself on it. But now I can't even hear that word without cringing, without wanting to run so far and fast that no one can ever associate that definition with me. Because I wasn't different in the way I assumed my mom meant. 

I don't exactly know how to phrase this, so I'll just put it like this.

The kind of _different_ I thought I was: superior, radiant, magical, infinte, unique, resplendent, ingenious, enchanting, ethereal, the apex of amazement

The kind of _different_ I really was: broken, faded, deplorable, wrong, rhapsodic, sick, shattered, insane, pathetic, a burden

I hated myself, Josh. Despised every inch of my very being, every thought, every breath, every hair on my fucking head. Because I spent my entire life thinking that I was special only to realize that I wasn't. Wasn't special, wasn't intriguing, wasn't anything, save a fucking mess.

I didn't know there was a name for it, at first. I didn't know and I couldn't explain. I was incapable of articulating that sometimes Atlas tired of his job and decided to make me lighten his load. That I felt like a black hole, imploding in on itself, sucking everything I once loved dry until it was a meaningless shell. 

I have words for it now. Too many of them, I might add. Words like clinical depression and crippling anxiety. Words like obsessive compulsive and suicidal tendencies and extreme mood swings and a disturbing lack of empathy

Words that weighed down on me through every smile and laugh and half-hearted joke I concocted. They were _sounds_ , nothing more than arbitrary syllables scrawled on paper, but they consumed me. They trapped me. They whispered to me on the worst of nights, assured me that they confined me, that they were all I was capable of being.

I love you, Josh.

I love you in the way people in movies love, with the world suddenly colorful and your hair the brightest thing in my life and maybe, just maybe, I love you in a way that makes me think I should stick around just a little longer.

I love you so fucking much, Josh, and that's why you need to know that I am a shattered windshield. I'm here, I'm held together, but sometimes everything becomes as dark as midnight and I'm much too aware of the cracks spiraling around me, digging throughrough me. I love you enough to let you know that you can't fix me. That I've woken up in hospitals with stitched up wrists and a pumped stomach, crying because I was so fucking _close_. That I've written letters that are _that_ kind of note.

I love you and you said you love me, too. 

If you change your mind, I won't blame you. Really, I promise I won't. Because this isn't like the movies, J, no matter how much I feel like a character in one when I look at you. You can't glue me back together. Only I can do that, and I'm still trying to learn how.

Until then, I'll still be an iceberg, a broken windshield, a black hole. And if that's what you want, then I could be _your_ iceberg, Josh. I wouldn't mind. 

I wouldn't mind much of anything, as long as you were there. 

This is cheesy, J, and that's okay. 

It's okay.

I'm okay.

Or, you know? Maybe I'm not okay. But that's okay, too.

 

-Tyler


End file.
